I have no biology experience but I want to try breeding simple organisms to see if I can get interesting traits

I have no biology experience but I want to try breeding simple organisms to see if I can get interesting traits.

How would I go about trying to make mycelium that is mobile, so it could possibly become a life form with a skeleton of fungus and a body of dirt?

Also, making an arena where slime molds compete with each other sounds fun too.

Now listen here OP, I much as I would love to help you I don't know jack shit about biology

mycelium

you can do bacteria too and other stuff

mycelium

ya

funny enough i've been thinking about that this

bloop bloop
mycelium

I think you would have to design obstacle courses where the nutrients are separated by inorganic possilbly even hazardous sections, and then just culture the stuff that makes it to the end of the course

wow

Let's put the FUN in FUNgus!

mycelium

you could breed stuff to climb for sure it wouldn't even be hard just thin substrates suspended vertically innoculated only at the bottom

ya i know
and look how it spreads:

culture from the the stuff that gets to the top and maybe the stuff that climbs the innitial significant distance

nice

mycelium

good

if wanted to walk or crawl, you'ld have to breed some super fast growing stuff, but if you did that you have like solved world hunger. a strain of myc that could colonize and fruit off a peice of wood in mere moments would be awesome... or incredibly dangerous

The question is, how do you force it to be mobile?
You can make it bridge increasingly large gaps, but then you're probably just making tree-like mycelium.

Perhaps you could make the mycelium form a long tendril with food placement, then somewhere to the side place food and have breed based on speed of doing that.

There's fungi that can lasso nematodes, which shows that they can move without having to create new structures in their path.
I have no idea how you'd breed for the trait though.

Can't really know for sure, i dunno I haven't heart og any genetically modified mycelium at the moment, but you can breed traits in mycelium pretty quickly its would really just come down to designing the enviroment most likely to induce the attribute you're looking for. I'm actually going to be getting into this myself I'm pretty excited about it

>OP disappears one day
>eventually his landlord hires someone to break down the door because he's super late on his rent and isn't answering calls
>no one in the house
>they go into the basement
>they find a crude laboratory
>in the corner is a hunched figure, almost humanoid, that breaks into fragile chunks of dessicated mycelium at a touch
>it's too late, they've already inhaled the spores

mycelium

You should just go for it design the environments that youthink will give u a particular change and innoculate it and any myc that makes it way to the food source you culture back into the environment and overtime the myc should adpat to navigatinge it. build mycelium mazes essentially

>the corpse has its thumbs up, and there is a message written on a screen
>"nice, mycelium"

pretty much

maybe don't work with cordyceps

Step 1: find a fast growing fungus
Step 2: arrange in lanes. For best results induce random mutations higher than that which occurs naturally.
Step 3: measure how far fungus has moved at end of time period
Step 4: select fungi that have moved the furthest. Cross breed with other fungi
Step 5: clean out lanes and repeat until you get a fast moving fungus.

This will take a very, very, very, very long time and could very well turn out to be impossible. There is not much energy to obtain from breaking down cellulose and it is much better for the fungi to put that energy into making new fungus rather than moving.

>result: none of the fungi moved
I'd probably say the best setup would be one which encouraged growing through the air.

Picture this:
>fungi on one side of gap
>food on other
>fungi sends stalk out towards food
>stalk sags as more of it is over the gap
>fungi can grow towards food still but alternatively it could modify the already existent stalk to bend upwards

And if you made the gaps of varying sizes and angles, that would guarantee that modifying already existent stalks is the most efficient method of getting the food, rather than growing the stalks at an odd angle under the assumption they'll sag.

Fungi moves by growing.
A single petri dish of mycelium is loaded with genetics you shouldn't initially need to breed only isolate.